Theater Geek by Mickey Rapkin

Author:Mickey Rapkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

Carl Samuelson behind his desk in Stagedoor Manor’s main office. Carl would often come out to greet the children on their way into breakfast, famously repeating this phrase: “Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning.”

Seth Herzog (a comedian who now warms up Jimmy Fallon’s studio audience nightly) puts a fine point on it: “Jon Cryer left camp to do Brighton Beach on Broadway. And then he did No Small Affair, the Demi Moore movie. He went from the guy in my bunk to being a film star. Scott Schustman—who went by Scott Tyler—left camp in the middle of the summer to do Once Upon a Time in America. He played the young Bobby De Niro part. There was this vibe: This is happening.”

Carl, sniffing yet another marketing tool, compiled a list of every camper who was cashing a paycheck—in theater, in film, in television commercials—and that list was mailed out to prospective campers and their parents. If anybody did something of note, it was included in that letter. It started as a skinny packet. And then it wasn’t. The message: Stagedoor Manor might be more expensive than other summer camps, but the tuition is nothing short of an investment in your child’s future.

And for the first time, talented suburban children with no connections to show business could see a through line to Hollywood. In the ’90s, the big opportunities for child actors were The Mickey Mouse Club and Kids Incorporated—both run out of Orlando, Florida. “If you wanted to be discovered,” says Marshall Heyman (now a journalist covering Hollywood for glossy publications like W magazine), “you went to Orlando. But our parents weren’t moving us to Orlando. There weren’t any Disney Channel sitcoms. And even if there were, our parents wouldn’t have wanted us to be on one. We went to auditions for game shows like Steampipe Alley and Kids Court.” No one expected to be discovered scooping ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery—as Long Island’s Nikki Blonsky later would be for the movie Hairspray. Unsure of what to do, parents sent their kids to Stagedoor.

This dovetailed nicely with a change in the nation’s attitude toward summer camps, which (as an institution) had previously been about little more than nature hikes and canoe trips—not to mention an eight-week reprieve for weary parents. But the 1990s saw a boom in specialty camps across the United States, from wildly expensive athletic programs to NASA-sponsored space camps. “Previously, kids would go to the same camp year after year,” says Peg Smith, the CEO of the American Camp Association. “But kids started to collect a menu of experiences—they’d go to soccer camp for three weeks, then music camp for three weeks, and then a traditional camp for three weeks.” The number of specialty camps in these years exploded—you no longer had to send your kid to a theater camp run by a drunk Ronald McDonald clown. Parents were now employing professional camp advisors, in the same way they might enlist a college counselor to guide them through the labyrinthine university application process.

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